ECS P6BXTA+

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ECS P6BXTA+ - Page 1

The
Elitegroup P6BXT-A+

It's
two boards in one!

The
poeple at ECS
really decided to do something different this time. They put their
Marketing Hats on and decided to bring the Reseller/Custom
Configurers and the End User community a board with a great deal of
flexibility! They let go of conventional design practices and really
thought "out of the box" with this board!

Take a look at the picture below. You aren't seeing things. This
board has both a Socket370 and a Slot 1 on it! Now, instead of being
limited to only one or the other of the two most recent Intel CPU
interfaces, you can choose which version best fits your
budget/performance curve. Here's the rest of the details.

Another
great feature of this board is it's on board A3D Sounds System. It
is based on the A3D Version 1 chipset. We'll cover that a little
later. Also, this board comes equipped with a CPU Setup option in
its BIOS. One slightly limiting factor is the 4 PCI/2ISA slot
configuration. We would have liked to have seen 5 PCI slots.

On the other hand, you won't need a sound card so you'll have an
extra PCI or ISA slot free! Also, the position of the ATX Power
Connector is a notable improvement over most boards! The connector
is located out of the way of the CPU, just where it should be.
Speaking of connectors, the PC99 color connectors for the on board
IO and Sound Ports look cool too!

Although this
board does not have voltage adjusting capabilities, it was a very
competent "overclocker". We set up our Celeron 300a at 450
MHz. We also set our RAM up in a CAS2 configuration to acheive
optimal memory performance. This board was rock solid stable through
our battery of tests. The BIOS is easy to configure. Once you set a
jumper on the board to the 100 MHz. FSB setting, you can adjust the
speeds from 100-133 MHz. We also tried 112MHz. for a total of 504
with our C300a. The processor booted Win98 but locked shortly after.
With a little more creative cooling (we were using a stock Intel
boxed set up) we feel a stable 504 is within reach on this board. We
were very happy with this board in this area.

Here are the test stats...

Benchmarks

WinTune
98

Offline
Test Results

CPU

(1)
Celeron 300a with MMX @ 450 MHz

Video
Board

NVidia
RIVA TNT

Video
Mode

1024X768@16bits/pixel

RAM

96
MB

OS

Windows
98 4.10.1998

Area
Tested

Value

CPU
Integer

1350.274
MIPS

CPU
Floating Point

539.1442
MFLOPS

Video(2D)

82.073
MPixels/s

Direct3D

130.4424
MPixels/s

OpenGL

71.36538
MPixels/s

Memory

820.4862
MB/s

Cached
Disk

78.73181
MB/s

Uncached
Disk

2.903789
MB/s

These
are solid numbers. There is nothing too earth shattering either way
here. Once again, I want to emphasize the stability of this board.
We had our Celeron 300a PPGA Processor set at 150 MHz. over spec.
and at default voltage. These numbers are in the ballpark of a
P2-450. For a Motherboard and CPU combo that comes in at less than
$200, you can't beat this kind of performance!

Let's
move on to a little more robust benchmark, shall we?

ZD
Winbench 99 Tests

ECS
P6BXT-A+

WinBench
99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

1870

WinBench
99/Business Graphics WinMark 99

148

WinBench
99/CPUmark32

920

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

1870

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:AVS/Express 3.4 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

3830

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:FrontPage 98 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

24600

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:MicroStation SE (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

6500

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

6580

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Photoshop 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

5270

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Premiere 4.2 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

5610

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Sound Forge 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

9260

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Visual C++ 5.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

7550

WinBench
99/FPU WinMark

2460

WinBench
99/GDI Playback/HE/AVS/Express 3.4

49.1

WinBench
99/GDI Playback/HE/FrontPage 98

108

WinBench
99/GDI Playback/HE/MicroStation SE

15.1

WinBench
99/GDI Playback/HE/Photoshop 4.0

62.5

WinBench
99/GDI Playback/HE/Premiere 4.2

59.8

WinBench
99/GDI Playback/HE/Sound Forge 4.0

132

WinBench
99/GDI Playback/HE/Visual C++ 5.0

209

WinBench
99/High-End Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

6580

WinBench
99/High-End Graphics WinMark 99

497

Is that enough
data for you? These are excellent CPU numbers and the High End Disk
numbers look great too!

Audio
Performance

There is not
much that needs to be said really about this aspect of the board.
The quality of the on board audio is classic A3D technology. The 3D
positional effects are great and the fidelity more than adequate for
the average gamer. It may not be the most leading edge since A3D 2.0
is out now, but it comes basically for free with this board. It is
quite a value from any perspective.

Overall
Impression

We really
enjoyed this great new innovation that ECS has brought to market
with the P6BXT-A+. It was a solid stable performer with the
flexibility to change to different CPU technologies depending on
your budget.

Many System
Integrators should take note of this board. Just think... one board
for all of your Celeron, Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 needs and throw in
free audio to go with it! Well done Elitegroup!